[Richard]

JD

Sorry mate another wish for the plugin! The option if possible to export hidden layers!

Why? There is a new fur plugin for SU that works brilliantly (if not on a mc it would seem) http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtop ... 23&t=28092.

The option to create say grass and have it on a hidden layer so as to not disrupt SU would be great though to also have it export without unhiding the layer!

[brodie_geers]

Wow, nice plugin find there Richard. I've been awol from the SU forums for awhile so I'm glad you posted that. Definite +1 on that plugin suggestion!

-Brodie

[JDHill]

I'll look into it...

[messire]

Materials

There is something that is always buggy in SU is the material panel working with MR.
What we do is create mxm's then resize the main jpg ( reflectance) under 200 k and put it in another folder, so when creating the SU counterpart with the same name as mxm ( in order to use auto-mxm feature), it does not hammer the speed in SU. Despite this the SU material library is still heavy as hell, whatever the size of RAM or processor speed ( it takes around 10 seconds to switch from wood to stones etc each time).

There is a thing that would dramatically increase the workflow in SU / MR plug in
- auto creation of the SU counterpart by mxm folder scanning, yes it would be needed to manually import the reduced textures since sometimes in multilayer mxm its not obvious what the main texture is.. the idea would be that each time i create a new mxm, SU would ask me to select which library to update etc...

I'm curious on how the relation between SU and MR material ( mxed) panel will interract in that new plug in!

Nils

[Richard]

I'm not sure how that would work nils! Could you give a brief step by step example!

BTW set SU material browser to list view rather than thumbs! Generating the thumbs is it's slow point. I wish Google would just make the darn browser not open everytime one just wants to sample and paint! Everyone has been asking for that for years.

[messire]

Yes its true that the big slow stuff is to have SU embed the .jpg each time within the material .skm... it makes it very slow because each time it opens the material panel it has to load and move all the jpgs from that folder...I'm even thinking to resize them down from 200k to 50 k with a higher compression it is so slow!! ( like mxm's they should be linked as it was in SU 5 and previous versions...)

Anyway what i'm thinking and asking for years now is the ability to create automatically with the MR plug in within SU the mxm counterpart by just loading either the full mxm folder, or one mxm by one... I imagine a two step menu with pre-saved folder path asking:
1. choose mxm to convert, valid it then
2. choose layer from mxm ( aka choose jpg ( reflectance, bump, thumbnail etc..) and with a small slider set the output size of the said jpg... eg: resize with file size or file weight in K ( such as in acdsee resize menu for example). then valid. It would be quite simple then for the plug in to load that particular jpg, resize it, save it to a specified folder ( or directly embed it in a skm) and create the SU texture with it with the mxm name.

Now one has to manually pick up the jpg, put a copy in a special folder ( i call it the SU size folder), resize it to the wanted size/weight, open SU, open material folder, manually create a SU texture with the mxm name ( and verify the name is accurate), load the special sized jpg, then save it....It means always go through long paths in windows manually etc...a real pain!

Nils

[fv]

forget about texturing in SU.
I had to since the current plugin for OSX is not really working well with automxm.

Google has no clue how bad the SU material panel really is. Since rendering has become mainstream Google should really do something but I have lost my faith in Google.

I would advise anyone who is doing serious modeling and rendering to export your models in well organized parts and handle all materials in Studio. In Studio you can alter, fine tune and assign materials to your geometry in a fraction of the time and without any effort. I only texture certain materials that need to be textured on very specific parts of the geometry. Just because its a little easier to place a texture map on an exact location in SU.

The more you do in Studio the better, Studio handles geometry much faster as well. The only thing missing in Studio (in SU as well) is a folder system to organize assigned materials. That would make it perfect. Its a bit of a nuisance to scroll the long list of materials in Studio all the time knowing it could easily be well organized by NL. I hope they read this.
Francois

[Richard]

If your not worried about exact map placement but simple repeat why not use just white maps in SU I did this when I was playing with my low poly car test, applied the material then swapped out for white map same size very low size!

Trust though mate these are just workarounds, the feature for the plugin would be great!

[messire]

Richard,
Indeed would be a solution but:
- when you use many materials how do you recognize them visually if they are all white?
- we happen to use bulk SU images as well for quick vizualisation and therefore an idea of the material scale helps...

François,
I agree with you but this does not work well with our workflow because we are outputting images within two weeks during competitions for example, and the 3D model is evolving quick: If there was a way to get back from Studio to SU with the model without loosing anything it would be ok. I agree your method seems the best when the model is achieved, its almost never the case with us due to lack of time during conception. Hence the need for a well integrated plug-in to be used within SU.

Nils

[fv]

Hi Nils,
especially when I am in a hurry I export parts of the model directly to Studio. I do not see any advantage to keep the model in SU until its finished.

This is my workflow.
1. terrain modelling, export to Studio and texture it there until good
2. new file in SU, model parts of the building and export to mxs and texture in Studio and finetune there.
3. Keep going back and forth to SU/Studio to add and tune parts of the building until the model is good.
4. add people, cars, trees etc and export them as seperate mxs files
5. import the finished and textured mxs files into the terrain mxs and render it all together.

If I had to render one SU file and export it to Studio for testrenders I need a few days extra to debug and export and model large SU files. Basicly impossible. In my workflow all is responsive without much lagtime for model redraw or texture setting in SU. Its even response with 500Mb files assembled in Studio. You just have to get used to SU files that are worthless by themselves. My textures in SU look weird, since they are colored to be easily recognized while modeling in SU. Like orange glass edges and deep blue transparant glass etc. Works very quick though.
Once you are into this kind of modeling all sort of things become easy to do. I use a lot of the plugins for SU and they generate a lot of geometry for organic shapes. It does not matter since they are all gathered up in seperate files to Studio. I don't like to wait, modeling should be fun not an excersie in patience. I have to add though that in the end my patience is always tested but less than having to get a complete rendering out of one SU file.
Francois

[Richard]

Richard,
Indeed would be a solution but:
- when you use many materials how do you recognize them visually if they are all white?
- we happen to use bulk SU images as well for quick vizualisation and therefore an idea of the material scale helps...

Mate I often use just a straight black and white for that then colourize the material in SU, for components that have been mapped previously and bought in as components the map can be white. Like Francois I have red and green brickwork, yellow tiles, blue roof - all to make modelling faster. If I have a few brick types I'll use the same low res B/W map with differing colours so mapping is all same size and easy!

For example I mainly render exteriors, I want some interior so all may interiors to a room are one model with everything bar emitters sharing the same map (the map obviously has areas for framed prints, beds, wall colour, ceiling, lamps, sheets, pillows, carpet or tiles etc!) all in one map, all in one MXM! This way about 60% of all materials in a scene are just one MXM, doing several things like this in a scene where materials are common to many scenes can save so much mucking around and lost links and materials. I have the map as PSD so any changes made to any material can be handled direct via PS or layers in the MXM!

My material list in SU and Studio is down to about 20 in a full complex scene!

[fv]

there must be some news by now..... JD... are we going to see it happen before the summer holdiays (european)..

[JDHill]

It is quite close now -- I am nearly done writing the plugin's export code.

Using a model you sent me (an office building complex), the plugin exports an MXS in less than half the time SketchUp takes to save the document -- about 13 seconds on my Q6700 quad core. 9 of those seconds are taken by SketchUp writing its texture files to disk. During export, the plugin uses a maximum of 120MB of memory; for comparison, the old plugin takes about 50 seconds and uses about 800MB. Exporting a single-sided, triangulated OBJ takes about 9 1/2 minutes and uses about 121MB, even though the file is written sequentially.

The fastest export format besides MXS, DAE single-sided and triangulated, takes 23 seconds and uses about 130MB of memory during export; the file it produces is 22MB, while the MXS exported by the plugin is only 14MB. The SketchUp document is 31MB.

Testing with another document a user sent me, which would cause SketchUp to run out of memory with the old plugin, the new plugin exports the model in 9 seconds (SketchUp takes 20 seconds to save this document), using 140MB of memory.

While it will always depend on how the model is built, the new plugin looks to be about twice as fast exporting MXS as SketchUp is at saving the document in most cases -- sometimes it will be more, sometimes less. I am fairly certain that it will be the fastest file-export plugin available for SketchUp; I have benchmarked it against demos of a few of the other plugins, and it is anywhere from 4X to 40x as fast. It also exports distorted textures perfectly, and respects the materials-by-layer setting correctly; both of these aspects will fail in many circumstances with the old plugin.

So that is what you are waiting for, performance-wise -- naturally, you will need to re-evaluate your strategy (as discussed in the previous few posts) based on these improvements.

[Richard]

WOW!!

JD!!!!!!!!

Mate that is something I really didn't even expect that the speed of the plugin was something you were actually considering and then in such a BIG way!

This is amazing, given the shear start up speed of M renderer then testing direct from export is amazing! I have big smile this end as this being my preference! Again though there is still that issue with merging files building / landscape for eg, that call up use of studio (don't get me wrong excepting navigation - I love studio, just don't want to NEED to use it)!

Great stuff again JD!!!!!!

Funny though and in aussie humour have to say it (like one would to a politition) "yeah fastest at doing it's job but slowest at getting here!"

BTW JD

Mate I haven't done a great deal of rendering in the recent months though since doing a few over the past month I've been noting since the later upgrades of SU (since 7 or first thereafter) I've found a model cannot host any groups or components pretty much without causing material issues! (MR 1.7.1 / exporter V2.2) yeah all the old stuff! Though I cant imagine the material muck up wouldn't follow to MR 2.1!

See image below the upper panels and battens are groups!! See obvious material differences across all sheeting and battens! See also garage doors left side weird dark shadows -right side weird black brick, rear wall inside entry space, actually rear wall of left front room and the front door as well (same material as pergola)! When all these groups are exploded the issue then migrates to other areas!

Thsi occured in similar way previously on earlier SU versions though only within the last created component, a work around was to ensure you copy the last component and move out of scene! Now though it seems the only remedy is to explode all - NOT a great workaround if the clint wants mods!

I haven't bought this up till now, as said haven't been doing a lot and didn't quite understand the problem! Though looking back on the last few jobs done I do note weird things that I thought may have been from my lighting setup!

BTW this attached test rendered with skydome to ensure the issue wasn't born from sun direction.

[fv]

HI JD, speed at export is very important. Since testrendering and exporting is such a big deal in the workflow with SU and third party render app's. I hope it works well.

Material by layer is not used much I am afraid, at least not by me.

I would like it a lot if layers would import in Studio as named groups. Before I start to repeat things mentioned before I will just practise a little more patience.

Are you planning any kind of beta release for the plugin ?
Francois